Global Beauty Products Company
Macrospect provided the world’s premier beauty products maker with financial planning solutions that were more than cosmetic.
Situation:
With over 30 brands in 150 countries, the world’s sixth-largest maker of prestige cosmetic, fragrance, skin and hair care products had a clarity issue. Tracking, planning and reconciling over 5,000 capital-spend projects per year on Excel spreadsheets proved to be somewhat daunting to say the least. They viewed SAP for Planning embedded as the first step in moving to S/4HANA and needed the right partner to help them get there.
Key challenges included:
- Legacy system didn’t allow enough visibility into capital planning and spending numbers, making it difficult to determine ROI on any given project
- Budgeting data wasn’t available in a way that allowed for airtight strategic planning
- Strategic planning process was disconnected from budgeting process
- Reconciling plan versus actual per capital project data was inexact
- Manual spreadsheet updating and maintenance was time-consuming and provided limited reporting and analytics
Objectives:
- Align financial systems with the company’s mandate of continuous improvement
- Create a systemized approach to planning that allowed key executives to plan spend based on real-time data
- Provide accurate plan versus actual per capital project data
- Reduce time spent on manually updating Excel spreadsheets
Solution:
By design, SAP for Planning offers immediate advantages that will solve any number of issues. Solving issues that didn’t go by the numbers is what made this case unique. That “Wait a minute!” moment came early in the process when the Macrospect team uncovered the root of the client’s planning and capital spending problem. They then devised ways to put SAP for Planning to work solving it. By using the embedded model of SAP to align business processes with the needs of their finance department, Macrospect helped reel in the company’s maverick spend and provided clarity where it counts. It wasn’t something the client asked for, but it felt like something that was called for.
Benefits:
- Greater analytics and monthly reporting capabilities
- Plan capital spending by brand and region
- Manage project approvals by using SAP Planning-provided business case data
- Automatically capture plan versus actual spending for variance analysis by capital project
- Reduce maverick spend significantly
- Initiated first strategic step on their path to S/4HANA